 Alright, in this video I'm going to explain exactly why I think NFTs are going to completely change the stock photo and video market over the next 10 years. I'm going to start by going through how the stock photo and video market works today, talk about what the disadvantages of this are and how they can be solved with blockchain technologies and NFTs. So let's get into it. So I can't really get into how I think NFTs are going to totally change the stock photo industry without talking about how stock photos are bought and sold today. So that's where I'm going to start. If this is something you already know, you already know exactly how the different ways people can buy and sell stock photos, feel free to skip ahead using the timestamps below. But let's just take a look at the different ways that I can sell my stock photos. The first way that I can do it is a direct in-person sale. Now this almost never happens. Actually, this really never happens, right? But it's totally possible that somebody could come up to me and say, hey, I want to buy a license to one of your images and I happen to have a hard drive with those images. They then copy them and they hand me the money, like hand me the cash. Now if they were to do that, then 100% of the money, or all the money that they sold for the license, would go to me, OK? Now that is very rarely the case because most of the photo sales that happen these days is happening online. But I wanted to talk about that it is possible to sell photos or sell licenses to photos without a middleman in between. It's just very rare that that actually happens. Now obviously a lot of people aren't going to want to email a photographer every time they want to purchase a photo, right? So because of that, I sell my photos online. I've got a website and I can go on to that website. You know, I upload all my photos there. I've got a clearly marked price. So anybody who wants to purchase a license can go to my website, see what the price is and decide to purchase that. Now I personally use Smuckbuck for that. There's lots of other solutions out there, but they all work in similar ways. They are portfolio sites, e-commerce sites that allow photographers to sell their photos. And the advantage of this is they take a relatively small percentage compared to what like an agency would take. So for example, on Smuckbuck, the markup is 15%. So if I want to make $10 for a photo, I can charge $10 for the photo. The end customer will end up paying $11.50. $1.50, that goes to Smuckbuck. $10 of that goes to me. And the advantage of that for the buyer is that all the photos are up there and they can easily go through. Now the disadvantage of that obviously is there's a lot of photographers out there. I don't have a photo for every single advertising campaign. So what buyers would typically prefer to do rather than going to every photographer's website and purchasing them, although they do definitely do that sometimes, they prefer to go to an agency where they can search a large number of photos and more quickly find the photos they're looking for. And that's where microstock sites come in. Sites like Shutterstock, Alamy, Adobe Stock, a lot of what I talk about on this channel, all of those are microstock sites. Microstock sites work differently. Microstock sites, what they're doing is they're creating the collection and they're selling the collection directly to the customers. And they're really keeping the photographer out of it. The photographer doesn't necessarily even know specifically, in a lot of cases, who purchased their photos. Microstock sites also do a lot of advertising. So when you look at like a Smugbuck site or when you set up a photography website, you're responsible for driving all the traffic there. So if you want to, you know, you can do Google ads. You can do social media. But it's your responsibility to get people to that website. Microstock sites work differently. They actually bring the customers to the website. So they run advertising campaigns. They run email marketing campaigns. They do a lot of work to try to get customers to come in. And oftentimes they run a subscription base as well too. So they offer subscriptions. Now, the reason the buyers like these sites is they offer consistent pricing. So every photographer has to agree to the site's pricing before they get in there. So it doesn't matter which photo they find. They can basically get the same pricing on it. As well as there are a lot bigger companies, right? These are big companies with more advanced websites. They can add more features to their websites because of this. And because of that, they're very popular in a lot. Most photos, I would say these days are licensed on Microstock sites. OK, now, however, the disadvantage of this is for this service, they have a very large markup and, you know, a lot of the times the markup will all the time the market is at least 100%. So they're at least doubling it. But that's very rare. Most of the time it's 5, 600 or 700% markup. OK, so as an example, if I have a photo and I make $1 from that photo, then I'm selling that photo for $1 or licensing it out for $1 on one of these sites. Well, what's happening is at the end, the person who's taking the license is probably paying $7 or $8 and Shutterstock or one of these other companies is keeping $7 and they're giving the photographer $1. OK, so these do provide some services. They do provide some ads. But they do also take a huge markup in response to this, right? And this is, I think, where the opportunity lays, right? A lot of people when they look at, you know, the stock photography industry, they look at, you know, we just want to raise prices, right? We want to be able to charge more. Well, it's unrealistic. There's a lot of photos out there for a certain amount of sale right now or price right now on these stock sites. And I don't think, you know, other companies would try this to raising the prices is the solution to get photographers more money out of that. OK, but what we can do is reduce the amount of markup that these middlemen are taking, right? And that's how they want to talk about what NFTs can do in just a moment. OK. But before we get into that, there's other ways that photos can be purchased, right? This, you know, industry of middlemen is just expanding and it continues to expand. So if you look at companies like Facebook or Wix or HubSpot, right? Think about Facebook, for example. Facebook has ads, OK? So Facebook wants to sell ads to small businesses. Well, those small businesses sometimes don't have stock photography. They don't have good photos for their ads. OK, so Facebook, they basically saw an opportunity here. They said, you know, we have, you know, people that are coming to our platform, they need to purchase stock photography. Why don't we sell them stock photos from directly when they're creating the ad? They'll buy more ads. We can also make a bit of money off stock photography. But Facebook had a problem. They don't have a collection, right? What are they going to do? How are they going to sell photos? They want to hire a bunch of photographers to go out there and recreate photos that are already available, right? They also don't want to go out and try to get photographers to upload photos to their platform. It's a lot of work to get, you know, millions of photographers in cases of Shutterstock and some of the other sites to upload their photos there. So what they'll do is they go to Shutterstock and say, hey, Shutterstock, you know, can we resell part of your collection? OK, and this is set up via all programmatically done via programs and an API. But then what Shutterstock does is they can say, OK, here's your price, Facebook, for these particular stock photos. And obviously they're marking up, you know, 250 to 700 percent. But then Facebook can mark that up further. OK, so as an example, you know, I can be selling a photo for $1, right, on Shutterstock and then somebody goes onto Facebook and purchases that for, let's say, $12 or $13. Well, I had that $1. One dollar goes to me. Let's say two or three dollars goes to Facebook and then $7 goes to Shutterstock. OK, so you see here that again, we're starting to talk about a thousands of percent markup to buy on these particular platforms. And, you know, Facebook doesn't want they prefer to, you know, take a larger portion of the market themselves, but they just don't have the collection to sell. I think, you know, Facebook and some of these other sites would prefer not to use a solution like Shutterstock, where they're already marking where they're doing a double markup. But again, there's just no options out there, but there could be, let's say, with NFTs, all right. And the last thing you want to get into is collection resellers. OK, so you look at someone like 500px or I am, what these are, these were platforms where people uploaded their photos. OK, and what they weren't able to do is they weren't able to go and find buyers, right? Another thing that's really difficult to do is find buyers and they couldn't find buyers. So instead of, and, you know, they tried, actually, 500px tried really hard to start up a stock photography business, but they weren't able to do it because they weren't able to compete with some of the micro stock sites on getting those. So what they did is rather than they still wanted to make money from photographers' photos, so they took those photos and they basically sold the rights to resell the collection to some of these other sites. So you can go on to, let's say, Getty Images and you can purchase photos that were uploaded to 500px. And again, everybody's taken a cut here when the photographer ends up getting the smallest one. OK. So basically you've got 500px, which takes a markup. It's very difficult to figure it out based on the way they do it. But then Getty also marks it up as well. So, you know, Getty's making a bunch of money off these photos, 500px is making a bunch of money off these photos. And the photographer is only making a very small amount from these photos. Right. And that's how the stock photography industry works today. Right. The vast majority of the money that's made from selling stock photos goes to intermediary companies, not the photographer. OK. Another way to put it is that intermediary companies do vast, very high markups based on all these digital photos that people have taken in the past. And there's good reasons why the stock photography industry has evolved this way. You know, buyers want to go to a website and search through a large collection of photos. And they want to be able to know that the photos they find, if they find the ones they like, they're going to be part of their budget. OK. And so the only way to do that with the technology, the way that it stood was for a company like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock or any of these other sites to set up a website, set up the servers, do all the technology. However, the way it is today, you know, there's only a handful of these stock photography companies and video companies. When I say stock photography, I really mean the whole stock industry, you know, you know, vectors, videos and photos. But it's very there's a handful of these that dominate the industry. And it's very hard for a new company to be able to compete with them, right? Shutterstock and Getty, they have so many images, right? They put a lot of effort into getting those images, getting licenses or the rights to license those images, putting them on their servers. And for a new company to start off, they'd have to go to every photographer and get them to upload their photos. And that's a huge upfront investment. And they'd have the same costs as those companies. So they wouldn't be able to do it at a cheaper price or do any better. And because of that, the stock photography industry has really stagnated around these top players, you know, they do acquisitions. If anybody comes up with a good idea that they may be able to compete with them, they just end up purchasing those companies and, you know, integrating them into their own. So over the past couple of years, there hasn't been a lot of changes to the way the stock photo industry works. However, I think that is going to change. And the thing that changed is NFTs and the blockchain. And I believe that the blockchain with NFTs, if done correctly, can give buyers everything they want without a middleman. And because there won't be a middleman, they will be getting rid of the middleman price, price markups and without those price markups, I believe it is possible to compete, right? And that's why I think that NFTs are really going to be able to disintermediate the stock photography industry over the next 10 years. However, the way that NFTs exist today, they're not really suitable for disintermediating the stock photography industry. I want to get a bit more into the details around this, because they're getting way too technical. But there's two types of NFTs you see out there, ERC721, which is used for collectibles. So when you think of NFTs, you probably think about these collectible NFTs, where basically someone creates a unique NFT and then they can then go and sell it to someone, that person can then go and resell it to someone else. OK, and they're basically used as collectibles like trading cards would be done. OK, there's another type of NFTs that are called ERC1155. And they're basically NFTs that can have quantity to them. So they're kind of more like prints. If you think of a photographer prints, right, they go out and do 50 prints of the exact same and then people can then go buy those prints and resell those prints. OK, but there's more than one. It's not a unique thing. There's like 50 of them, right? So it's more of a limited edition, right? And these have become very, very popular for collectors. And, you know, they've been popular over the last year, but they don't really help the, you know, stock photographers because what stock photographers want to be able to do is they want to be able to license their photos to many, many people, not not just a limited number of people. All right. And that is where the technology needs to be improved. So what I'm proposing is the creation of a new type of NFT being a licenseable NFT. Now, the way a licenseable NFT will work is it'll kind of be the best to both worlds, OK, when a photographer uploads a photo, they will upload a photo and it will create an NFT. Now, that NFT will represent the copyright for that photo. So most photographers will never transfer that photo and never sell that photo. However, when they upload that and they say they have the copyright, they will then be able to license that photo. So what a buyer can then do is come in and say, OK, I want to, you know, licenses photo for use. And then what they would do is pay what the photographer is asking. We'll talk about how that works in just a second. And then they would pay that money to the photographer. It would go directly to the photographer. And then they would receive an NFT that represents the license. OK, so what I'm saying is we need to have kind of a dual NFT system where an NFT represents a license to someone who's purchased it. That's going to prove that they've purchased it. And then we also need an NFT to how's the copyright for the particular photographer, right? So if you can imagine, let's say somebody, you know, has a large collection of stock photographer stock photos, what they could then do is let's say they've got 10,000 stock photos. They could then go and say, OK, this is what my minimum price is for each of these photos, right? And and upload them to this new NFT service. All right. So let's say, for example, they are already selling their photos on Shutterstock and they're willing to sell a license for a dollar. OK, so when they create that NFT, the minimum price to buy a license in that NFT would be one dollar. All right. Now, as part of this, there'd probably be a small markup as part of the fee. Probably, you know, two percent is what a lot of them are doing. So if the photographer says their minimum price is one dollar and there's a two percent fee for using the service, then if somebody wants to go and buy it, they could buy that license for a dollar and two cents. All right. And anybody can go through and purchase that. Now, if we go back to the original example, that kind of replaces the direct sale model, right? Where basically someone can go through and purchase it directly. But as we know, that's not going to be the only way that photos are going to be sold. So the reason the way that this will work is that anybody can go on to the blockchain, the advantage of blockchain is for permissionless and trustless, anybody can use it and they can purchase a license as long as they pay the photographer that one dollar. So for example, if a photographer wanted to set up their own website and was going to do their own marketing, the minimum price is a dollar, but they could mark it up for more. So you could set up my smug mug site, for example, to sell the photos for ten dollars. OK. And then what would happen is when a license was purchased, you could go through and the photographer being me, we get one dollar. And then the website owner also being me would get nine dollars and that could be split up that way. OK. So it's possible to use the exact same NFT to do direct sales, but then use the same NFT on a photo. All right. Now, third party agencies could also use this as well, too. Right. I think the thing that a lot of people have tried over the years is to get rid of the whole agencies, but we have to realize that agencies are going to be part of the stock photography industry forever. OK. That there's need that they do provide a valuable service. Right. Maybe today they've got a bit too powerful, right. But they will be around. But I think there'll probably be new agencies that will come up as part of this. All right. Now, what an agency can do is they do all the things that agencies do. Right. They can do the they can set up subscriptions. They can go and they can do marketing. OK. But the way the NFTs will work is there's that minimum price set by the photographer. So if somebody wants to go and purchase a license, what these agencies can do is basically advertise that license for five dollars, let's say, and then they can when they purchase that license for those dollars they can keep. And one of those dollars has to go to the photographer. OK. The way this works differently is the back end system for this will be NFTs and blockchain. It won't actually be the servers run by the company. They'll have to have their own web servers. But there's a it may sound similar, but there's a technology difference here in that the photographer is putting things on a blockchain. And then every other company that wants to sell photos is referencing that blockchain and they can sell them for as much as they want. As long as the photographer gets the minimum amount. OK. And what this is going to allow people to do is because the there is they're going to allow much better competition between these stock companies. And because of the stock companies, I think what you're going to see is that those margins of that markup is going to go down because it's going to be much easier once we have a collection of these NFTs that can be sold by anybody. Now, because of the way blockchain technology works, you can do a lot of other cool things around this, too. Right. One of the things that with these stock photography companies is that a photographer uploads a photo and then basically they get sold in once a month. They will then get get paid from that. However, you know, you can do a lot more if you're programming in how the payment works. As an example, let's say a model and a photographer want to go out and do a model shoot, you know, the photographer could go and create an NFT. But in that NFT, it could say that I want 50 percent of the sale to come to me. And I want 50 percent of the sale to go to the model, for example. Right. You can have it distributed in different ways. And it doesn't matter where that photo is licensed from, the model will always get that that amount. And the photographer will always get that amount because it's programmed into a smart contract, right? What this is really doing is it's taking, you know, the contract away from the agencies and putting it onto the blockchain, where basically everybody can see it. It's very it's much more. Accessible to everybody. So now I've tried to, you know, keep this video as non-technical as you can be possible in talking about NFTs, because the real, the target audience for this is photographers and creators to kind of understand how this technology can work. However, you know, I'm a very technical person and I have been working on this and it is technically possible to do all these things. However, it doesn't exist yet. There's no such thing as a licensable NFT, right? And what I'm talking about is, you know, this is the first video where I'm kind of explaining it in a bit more detail. But this is something that we're working on creating, not something that exists out in the world today. Now, if this interests you at all and you want to be involved in this project, once we get it going, you can go to uniquestock.io. We've got a mailing list there. You can basically go and sign up for the mailing list. I'll kind of keep you in the loop at what's happening and how our development is going, because we are going to need, obviously, a lot of people to upload their photos to this if we really want to be able to disintermediate the stock photography industries. We're already kind of starting to collect those names and, you know, we've already got thousands of people that have already signed up for that mailing list. However, we are really early stages, right? And, you know, when I say early stages, we've kind of got a proof of concept for how the technology is going to work, but there's still a lot more work that needs to happen at the blockchain development side of things. But we also need to do a lot of things regarding marketing and putting this out there, right? And we don't even really have a full name for this yet. So that's why I wanted to do this video as well, too. Just get your feedback. If you stuck along this long, this has probably been a pretty long video. You're obviously interested in this. And we're trying to figure out what the best thing to call this is. Right? One of the things to know is that when we set up our company, Fortaleu, right, we've kind of tackled this problem from a different way before and setting up the Fortaleu website and app where basically people can upload to all these different agencies, right? But one of the things we didn't think of is that when we named it Fortaleu is that in Britain, Lou means toilet. So then people, you know, from Britain, we're looking at this saying, oh, it's like fleshing photos down a toilet, right? So we obviously don't always know we're not the best at naming. So I wanted to get some feedback from you guys and what you think the best name for this would be, right? A couple of the names we're thinking out here is licensing NFT, license of bull NFT, digital asset licensing NFT, royalty free licensing NFT, you know, global stock asset licensing NFT. All things around licensing NFT. But what do you think this should be called? If there was an NFT out there that could be used to license photos, right? You know, what would make the most sense to you? You want to kind of understand, you know, come up with a name that most photographers are going to understand. So let me know in the comments what you think about the different names or if you have a better name for it. You know, I really want feedback from the photographers to kind of tell us, you know, what makes the most sense because you want this to be intuitive. The one of the things we've really struggled with or I really struggled with, I guess, is just how to explain this, right? I've got this picture of how it can work in my head, but trying to explain this with the technology of blockchains and NFTs. Everything is really new here. I know NFTs have really become more popular this year, but I think it's there's not a really good understanding, you know, of what they are and even myself. It took me a good six months to actually really understand and play with them and go in and start programming them even to really understand exactly how these work. OK, so want to make sure, you know, one of the biggest issues I think we're going to have with this is as we go forward, right? Is how are we going to get everybody on on board and understanding how this is a better way to do things? OK, and that's what I need your help with. Now, one of the things to note is that this is not going to take not going to happen quickly. OK, there is so much work that needs to happen to be able to compete with these large stock agencies, right? And we're talking about years of work. However, if you look at it, this is a fundamentally better way to do things, right? They having a decentralized system where there's a whole collection where anybody can go in and purchase the photo for a price that a photographer is willing to accept is a significantly better way of doing things than the way that we're doing that right now with all these middlemen in the markup. So although it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of time, it's definitely worth all the things that's inevitable, given where the technology is going. It's kind of like the whole DSLR versus mirrorless, right? Do you know what I mean? There for a very long time, cameras had to have mirrors because of film. Then we went into digital and the easiest way to move from film to digital is to keep the mirror in there. But once you moved to digital, you didn't really need a mirror, right? However, there's a lot of technology built up, a lot of lenses, a lot of other reasons why it just made sense to keep the mirror in there for a while. And it took a very, very long time for cameras and mirrorless cameras to catch up with the technology. And I think we can say today safely that mirrorless cameras can be made as good as mirror cameras, right? You don't really need the mirror in there for digital. It just took a long time and a lot of people fought it tooth and nail. And but eventually now there are mirrorless cameras. I think most people agree that, you know, mirrorless cameras are probably the future. And eventually, at some day in the future, mirrors will go away. Although there's still great, you know, mirrored cameras out there. I don't want to say there's not some comments about the Nikon 850 that's still a great camera. You still can take great photos with mirrored cameras. But going forward, obviously, the market is moving towards mirrorless. It's kind of the same thing. It's going to take a while for NFTs to be used to license photos. You know, once this is set up and it will take a very long time. There will always be people that are going to want to go to agencies and not use NFTs. But over time, because it's fundamentally a better technology, it will, I think, you know, increase the number of people purchasing licenses via NFTs and decrease, you know, the number of people purchasing licenses through traditional stock agencies. And the great news, too, is for you as a photographer or as a videographer or as a vector artist, the people that jump on this earlier get an earlier going to benefit, right? If you're going to look back to the whole mirrorless debate, Sony went full full in to the mirrorless day and look how they came out. The companies that jumped on mirrorless early, you know, had a lot of advantages and did very well compared to the companies who didn't jump on mirrorless early. And it's going to be the exact same thing for photographers. They're going to be huge advantages for those that get in early and, you know, start using this technology. Obviously, there's always road bumps when it comes to getting in early. But the type of technology is maturing. But I think, you know, if you've been around doing photography a while, the people who uploaded the first photos to Shutterstock did very, very well. And I think it's going to be the same thing with NFTs. The people who can get into this early are able to figure it out with us and they'll go forward. As as it grows, those people are going to get the majority of the rewards and the ones that, you know, wait behind, wait behind until it's everybody's already moved over. It's going to be much more difficult for them. So again, if this is something that interests you, make sure you subscribe to the channel, go to uniquestock.io and sign up for the mailing list and, you know, keep an eye on the space. I'm going to keep posting videos as much as I can about this as we kind of make progress through the bill and setting up these licensable NFTs. And as always, anyways, best of luck selling your photos online.